18th century
alexandra.coghlan
You really think they’d have learned by now. Any operatic vow to sacrifice the next living creature you see in return for salvation will reliably end up with the luckless suppliant faced with their lover/son/spouse. For those who haven’t already learned this handy lesson from Mozart’s Idomeneo, there’s Handel’s Jephtha. Its skeletal (and frankly rather daft) plot matters little, however. It’s the scaffolding for some of the composer’s most glorious oratorio writing, which last night was given the full (and often equally glorious) Sixteen treatment.There’s a gloss to The Sixteen’s sound that’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Last night’s Mozart and Haydn concert at the Barbican was billed as Magdalena Kožená with Les Violons du Roy. In practice it actually turned out to be Les Violons du Roy with Magdalena Kožená, which (barring a few die-hard fans of the Czech mezzo) was surely preferable for all concerned.Even on a good day Kožená’s voice has a thinness to it. At its best this can translate to agile coloratura, but it’s the vocal opposite of an iceberg – there’s really nothing anchoring it beneath the surface – and the minute any kind of strain or illness threatens it can quickly go adrift. Sounding ragged and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It's a considerable irony that a musician as dedicated and as serious as pianist/conductor Christian Zacharias should suddenly, at the age of 63, gain bragging rights on Youtube (see next page). There wasn't really that much he could do about it. It happened last October. A mobile phone went off as he was directing a Haydn concerto from the keyboard in Sweden. You can see his silent but intense frustration as he stops playing. “Don't answer,” he says. He waits until the loud noise of the moble phone stops, and gets back to playing. Accidents happen, and "Haydn Killed by Cell Phone" has now Read more ...
David Benedict
The great Marilyn Horne used to joke that she was going to release an album entitled “Chestnuts for Chest Nuts”. She never did, but that leaves the door wide open for Sonia Prina whose dark, thrillingly low sound marks her out as the real deal, a genuine contralto. But the excitement of Prina in performance isn’t just about her extraordinary skill at using her unusual range. Throughout this frankly dazzling recital of music Handel wrote for the superstar castrato Senesino, she wasn’t merely singing in front of the eight-strong Ensemble Claudiana, she was truly making music with them.Recently Read more ...
David Nice
Not every Yuletide fixture need be commercial and routine. Certainly St John’s annual Christmas Festival packs them in, but why wouldn’t it when the voices for the last two events, backed up by no less than the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, are the best you could possibly find for the great monuments of Handel and Bach?Admittedly, Bach’s cornucopia of celebration isn’t an oratorio like Handel’s Messiah, rather a sequence of six self-contained cantatas, of which last night’s team omitted two which are in no way inferior to the others (indeed, Part Four, with its horns adorning two Read more ...
David Nice
Nothing tests small-hall acoustics better than that most exuberant of holies, the Sanctus from Bach’s B minor Mass. After one of the year’s big disappointments, the blowsy sound coming from chamber ensembles in the Barbican/Guildhall School’s new Milton Court – a surprise miscalculation from Arup acousticians - it seemed imperative to get back to Kings Place’s Hall One, which feels bigger but is some 200 seats smaller (420 to Milton Court’s 608). And oh, the clarion cries of the 32 young Cambridge choral singers! The piercing but never ear-splitting beauty of perhaps the greatest Read more ...
David Benedict
There’s a reason why many people think Handel and, particularly his Messiah, is dull. Relatively easy to play, his music is incredibly difficult to perform well. Take this Temple Winter Festival outing with choral expert David Hill conducting the immensely skilled BBC Singers who can, and largely do, sing everything; four soloists all banishing grandiose, wobbly vibrato from days of yore; and the accomplished St James’s Baroque. There was nothing wrong with the performance... Unless, that is, you wanted the intensity, passion and, yes, the drama that Handel wrote.Scale is the key factor in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Georgians are in our marrow, and two of them in particular. The dawn of the age gave us Handel, who came over from Hanover with George I. Then at the sunset came the ever-exalted Jane Austen, who dedicated Emma in mock deference to the bloated Prince Regent. And in between there are all those elegant terraces in dark-brown brick, desirable survivors of the Industrial Revolution and the Luftwaffe.As this entertaining exhibition argues, the Georgian age is also the crucible to which the British owe much of their identity. It was in the pre-Victorian century that the middle classes, which Read more ...
David Nice
There’s a scene in Mozart’s most metaphysical opera which Ingmar Bergman, creator of what is still the richest of all Magic Flutes, describes as “at the outermost limit of life”. Hero Tamino seems to have reached a point of no return and no going forward. “When will this darkness end?”, he asks, and voices reply, “Soon, soon or never”.We must believe the extremity in that rite of passage. But not only are the vital choral responses unmysterious and perfunctory in this new ENO production; Complicite director Simon McBurney has it that the page of a giant video-projected picture book has Read more ...
Simon Munk
It's the disease most feared among all mainstream videogame franchises – featuritis. That is, the endless quest for some new marketing tick box addition dreamed up to ensure the fans keep coming back. That, sadly, appears to be the rapidly looming fate of the Assassin's Creed series.The bonkers premise behind the series – as best as I can understand it – is that rival secret organisations the Assassin's Brotherhood and the Knights Templar have been waging a clandestine war across history, involving the use of ancient, possibly alien technology. The spine of the series is that both sides have Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It is amazing how perceptions and attitudes change. Think of a nude and the chances are you will imagine a naked woman since, nowadays, the female body virtually monopolises the genre; naked men scarcely make an appearance in mainstream culture. This changed briefly in the 1970s, when American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe brought the male nude into focus with countless images celebrating masculine beauty. After his death in 1989, though, the naked male returned to the closet, relegated to porn movies and gay magazines.In 17th and 18th century France, the reverse was true. The male Read more ...
David Nice
What is the extraordinary, crowd-drawing appeal of a picture collection reunited, for a short time only, with its original surroundings? Well, for a start, this is no modest assembly of old masters, and Houghton Hall's elaborately crafted ensemble rooms constitute no conventional stately home. The feat of remarrying them has been so successful that Houghton Revisited has been extended for another two months, until 24 November.Clearly following in the rear of fashionable London, most of which seems already to have zipped to north Norfolk to see the wonders, I arrived from King's Lynn last Read more ...